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Dancing in Chains.  In the case of every Greek artist, poet, or writer we must ask: What is the new constraint which he imposes upon himself and makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to find imitators?  For the thing called "invention" (in metre, for example) is always a self imposed fetter of this kind.  "Dancing in chains"— to make that hard for themselves and then to spread a false notion that it is easy — that is the trick that they wish to show us.  Even in Homer we may perceive a wealth of inherited formulae and laws of epic narration, within the circle of which he had to dance, and he himself created new conventions for them that came after.  This was the discipline of the Greek poets: first to impose upon themselves a manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets; then to invent in addition a new constraint, to impose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and admired.  -Friedrich Nietzsche

“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.” -G.K. Chesterton